Systemic Determinants of the Information Systems Outsourcing Decision: A Comparative Study of German and United States Firms

The practice of information systems (IS) outsourcing is widely established among organizations. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that organizations differ considerably in the extent to which they deploy IS outsourcing. This variation has motivated research into the determinants of the IS outsourcing decision. Most of this research is based on the assumption that a decision on the outsourcing of a particular IS function is made independently of other IS functions. This modular view ignores the systemic nature of the IS function, which posits that IS effectiveness depends on how the various IS functions work together effectively. This study proposes that systemic influences are important criteria in evaluating the outsourcing option. It further proposes that the recognition of systemic influences in outsourcing decisions is culturally sensitive. Specifically, we provide evidence that systemic effects are factored into the IS outsourcing decision differently in more individualist cultures than in collectivist ones. Our results of a survey of United States and German firms indicate that perceived in-house advantages in the systemic impact of an IS function are, indeed, a significant determinant of IS outsourcing in a moderately individualist country (i.e., Germany), whereas insignificant in a strongly individualist country (i.e., the United States). The country differences are even stronger with regard to perceived in-house advantages in the systemic view of IS professionals. In fact, the direction of this impact is reversed in the United States sample. Other IS outsourcing determinants that were included as controls, such as cost efficiency, did not show significant country differences.

Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Second Research Roadmap

The goal of this roadmap paper is to summarize the state-of-the-art and identify research challenges when developing, deploying and managing self-adaptive software systems. Instead of dealing with a wide range of topics associated with the field, we focus on four essential topics of self-adaptation: design space for self-adaptive solutions, software engineering processes for self-adaptive systems, from centralized to decentralized control, and practical run-time verification & validation for self-adaptive systems. For each topic, we present an overview, suggest future directions, and focus on selected challenges. This paper complements and extends a previous roadmap on software engineering for self-adaptive systems published in 2009 covering a different set of topics, and reflecting in part on the previous paper. This roadmap is one of the many results of the Dagstuhl Seminar 10431 on Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems, which took place in October 2010.

Integration of WSNs into enterprise systems based on semantic physical business entities

Internet of Things based systems are anticipated to gain widespread use in industrial applications. Standardization efforts, like 6L0WPAN and the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) have made the integration of wireless sensor nodes possible using Internet technology and web-like access to data (RESTful service access). While there are still some open issues, the interoperability problem in the lower layers can now be considered solved from an enterprise software vendors' point of view. One possible next step towards integration of real-world objects into enterprise systems and solving the corresponding interoperability problems at higher levels is to use semantic web technologies. We introduce an abstraction of real-world objects, called Semantic Physical Business Entities (SPBE), using Linked Data principles. We show that this abstraction nicely fits into enterprise systems, as SPBEs allow a business object centric view on real-world objects, instead of a pure device centric view. The interdependencies between how currently services in an enterprise system are used and how this can be done in a semantic real-world aware enterprise system are outlined, arguing for the need of semantic services and semantic knowledge repositories. We introduce a lightweight query language, which we use to perform a quantitative analysis of our approach to demonstrate its feasibility.

Highly accurate evaluation of GPS synchronization for TDOA localization

Clock synchronization is critical for the operation of a distributed wireless network system. In this paper we investigate on a method able to evaluate in real time the synchronization offset between devices down to nanoseconds (as needed for positioning). The method is inspired by signal processing algorithms and relies on fine-grain time information obtained during the reconstruction of the signal at the receiver. Applying the method to a GPS-synchronized system show that GPS-based synchronization has high accuracy potential but still suffers from short-term clock drift, which limits the achievable localization error.

Investigation on the evolution of an indoor robotic localization system based on wireless networks

This work addresses the evolution of an artificial neural network (ANN) to assist in the problem of indoor robotic localization. We investigate the design and building of an autonomous localization system based on information gathered from wireless networks (WN). The article focuses on the evolved ANN, which provides the position of a robot in a space, as in a Cartesian coordinate system, corroborating with the evolutionary robotic research area and showing its practical viability. The proposed system was tested in several experiments, evaluating not only the impact of different evolutionary computation parameters but also the role of the transfer functions on the evolution of the ANN. Results show that slight variations in the parameters lead to significant differences on the evolution process and, therefore, in the accuracy of the robot position.

SLA-driven predictive orchestration for distributed cloud-based mobile services

We describe a system for performing SLA-driven management and orchestration of distributed infrastructures composed of services supporting mobile computing use cases. In particular, we focus on a Follow-Me Cloud scenario in which we consider mobile users accessing cloud-enable services. We combine a SLA-driven approach to infrastructure optimization, with forecast-based performance degradation preventive actions and pattern detection for supporting mobile cloud infrastructure management. We present our system's information model and architecture including the algorithmic support and the proposed scenarios for system evaluation.

A reliable, traffic-adaptive and energy-efficient link layer for wireless sensor networks

The paper presents a link layer stack for wireless sensor networks, which consists of the Burst-aware Energy-efficient Adaptive Medium access control (BEAM) and the Hop-to-Hop Reliability (H2HR) protocol. BEAM can operate with short beacons to announce data transmissions or include data within the beacons. Duty cycles can be adapted by a traffic prediction mechanism indicating pending packets destined for a node and by estimating its wake-up times. H2HR takes advantage of information provided by BEAM such as neighbour information and transmission information to perform per-hop congestion control. We justify the design decisions by measurements in a real-world wireless sensor network testbed and compare the performance with other link layer protocols.

QoE-aware Multiple Path Video Transmission for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) promise a wide scope of emerging potential applications in both civilian and military areas, which require visual and audio information to enhance the level of collected information. The transmission of multimedia content requires a minimal video quality level from the user’s perspective. However, links in WMSN communi- cations are typically unreliable, as they often experience fluctuations in quality and weak connectivity, and thus, the routing protocol must evaluate the routes by using end-to-end link quality information to increase the packet delivery ratio. Moreover, the use multiple paths together with key video metrics can enhance the video quality level. In this paper, we propose a video-aware multiple path hierarchical routing protocol for efficient multimedia transmission over WMSN, called video-aware MMtransmission. This protocol finds node-disjoint multiple paths, and implements an end-to-end link quality estimation with minimal over- head to score the paths. Thus, our protocol assures multimedia transmission with Quality of Experience (QoE) and energy-efficiency support. The simula- tion results show the benefits of video-aware MMtransmission for disseminating video content by means of energy-efficiency and QoE analysis.

Service-centric Networking Extensions

This paper discusses several issues of Service-Centric Networking (SCN) as an extension of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm. SCN allows extended caching, where not exactly the same content as requested can be read from caches, but similar content can be used to produce the content requested, e.g., by filtering or transcoding. We discuss the issue of naming and routing for general dynamic services for both tightly coupled and decoupled ICN approaches. Challenges and solutions for service management are identified, in particular for composed services, which allow distributed in-network processing of service requests. We introduce the term Software-Defined Service-Centric Networking as an extension of Software-Defined Networking. A prototype implementation for SCN proofs its validity and feasibility and underlines its potential benefits.

An OMNeT++ Framework to Evaluate Video Transmission in Mobile Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

The development and evaluation of new algorithms and protocols for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are usually supported by means of a discrete event network simulator, where OMNeT++ is one of the most important ones. However, experiments involving multimedia transmission, video flows with different characteristics, genres, group of pictures lengths, and coding techniques must be evaluated based also on Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics to reflect the user's perception. Such experiments require the evaluation of video-related information, i.e., frame type, received/lost, delay, jitter, decoding errors, as well as inter and intra-frame dependency of received/distorted videos. However, existing OMNeT++ frameworks for WMSNs do not support video transmissions with QoE-awareness, neither a large set of mobility traces to enable evaluations under different multimedia/mobile situations. In this paper, we propose a Mobile MultiMedia Wireless Sensor Network OMNeT++ framework (M3WSN) to support transmission, control and evaluation of real video sequences in mobile WMSNs.

Linked Services for Enabling Interoperability in the Sensing Enterprise

In future, the so called “sensing enterprise”, as part of the Future Internet, will play a crucial role in the success or the failure of an enterprise. We present our vision of an enterprise interacting with the physical world based on a retail scenario. One of the main challenges is the interoperability not only between the enterprise IT systems themselves, but also between these systems and the sensing devices. We will argue that semantically enriched service descriptions, the so called linked services will ease interoperability between two or more enterprises IT systems, and between enterprise systems and the physical environment.

TDOA-Based Localization System with Narrow-band Signals

This paper gives a general overview of the challenges that arise in using narrow-band signals, such as GSM, for localisation based on the time properties of the signal. Specifically, synchronisation and retrieving of time information are addressed. We pursue two contributions, namely, analysis of achievable synchronisation precision and processing of narrowband signals that can enable localization down to a meter. Keywords-localization, narrow band signals, TOA, TDOA I.

Demo Abstract: Disseminating WMSN Data by Using Social Network and Web

For smart cities applications, a key requirement is to disseminate data collected from both scalar and multimedia wireless sensor networks to thousands of end-users. Furthermore, the information must be delivered to non-specialist users in a simple, intuitive and transparent manner. In this context, we present Sensor4Cities, a user-friendly tool that enables data dissemination to large audiences, by using using social networks, or/and web pages. The user can request and receive monitored information by using social networks, e.g., Twitter and Facebook, due to their popularity, user-friendly interfaces and easy dissemination. Additionally, the user can collect or share information from smart cities services, by using web pages, which also include a mobile version for smartphones. Finally, the tool could be configured to periodically monitor the environmental conditions, specific behaviors or abnormal events, and notify users in an asynchronous manner. Sensor4Cities improves the data delivery for individuals or groups of users of smart cities applications and encourages the development of new user-friendly services.

Approximate decoding approaches for network coded correlated data

This paper considers a framework where data from correlated sources are transmitted with the help of network coding in ad hoc network topologies. The correlated data are encoded independently at sensors and network coding is employed in the intermediate nodes in order to improve the data delivery performance. In such settings, we focus on the problem of reconstructing the sources at decoder when perfect decoding is not possible due to losses or bandwidth variations. We show that the source data similarity can be used at decoder to permit decoding based on a novel and simple approximate decoding scheme. We analyze the influence of the network coding parameters and in particular the size of finite coding fields on the decoding performance. We further determine the optimal field size that maximizes the expected decoding performance as a trade-off between information loss incurred by limiting the resolution of the source data and the error probability in the reconstructed data. Moreover, we show that the performance of the approximate decoding improves when the accuracy of the source model increases even with simple approximate decoding techniques. We provide illustrative examples showing how the proposed algorithm can be deployed in sensor networks and distributed imaging applications.

2013 Doctoral Workshop on Distributed Systems

The Doctoral Workshop on Distributed Systems was held at Les Plans-sur-Bex, Switzerland, from June 26-28, 2013. Ph.D. students from the Universities of Neuchâtel and Bern as well as the University of Applied Sciences of Fribourg presented their current research work and discussed recent research results. This technical report includes the extended abstracts of the talks given during the workshop.